UK Passes 250,000 High-Speed Broadband Lines

High speed broadband roll-out in Britain has started to gain pace thanks to the efforts of Virgin Media and BT.

According to the latest figures released by broadband analysis firm Point Topic, there are 236,000 super-fast broadband lines in the UK offering speeds more than 25Mbps. Super-fast broadband lines in the country are expected to blow past the 250,000 mark this month.

But even this only represents 1% of the entire British market.

Point Topic’s Chief Analyst Tim Johnson believes that even though the number is quite modest, super-fast broadband could take the same route as the first generation broadband when it was launched 10 years ago.

“We went on from [about one percent] to reach over 13 million broadband lines within five years. Now we have over 19 million. It’s dangerous just to assume that history will repeat itself, but it’s still a good pointer to what will happen to super-fast broadband in this decade,” he said in a statement.

Laying high-speed broadband lines can be expensive, and the industry is dominated by Virgin Media and BT. Virgin Media is the market leader, with 146,000 high-speed broadband lines followed by BT with 86,000 lines. Other networks have only 4,000 high-speed broadband lines combined.